I do not adhere strictly to the FAQ suggestion (not a directive) that transfer requests should be for direct relatives within four generations (i.e., siblings, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren). I will transfer management of any memorial to any member of the extended family of the person in a memorial upon request with pleasure, provided that such person is equally liberal in granting transfer requests.

Personally, I'd rather have a memorial managed by a member of the extended family who has significant motivation to maximize the content of the memorial due to the family relationship than continue managing it myself. The distance back in time or the degree of relationship to that ancestor is irrelevant to the question of a person's commitment to the memorial.

Please provide your relationship to the person in the memorial when making the request.

This has been said about genealogy and I rather think that it applies with equal force to the volunteer work done here at Find A Grave:

Genealogy begins as an interest,
Becomes a hobby,
Continues as an avocation,
Takes over as an obsession,
And in its last stage,
Is an incurable disease.

If you would like me to take cemetery pictures for you, please include the grave location - one way to learn a grave location is to phone the cemetery; if a cemetery with thousands or even tens of thousands of graves has 20 photo requests and I have only an hour or two to take photographs, I am likely to select first the requests that include the grave location. Also, if you want multiple photographs (e.g., husband and wife), list both/all of them; I feel that I more helpful the more pictures that I take, so I am likely to give priority to a pair of requests.

If you would like to use one of my photos for your own personal purposes (e.g., to post on a profile on your family tree at Ancestry.com), feel free to do so, but please provide attribution (along the lines of "Originally contributed to the memorial for [name of person] on Find A Grave by Charlie Morgan").

A note about the Transcriptions Field - it's very time consuming to complete. I concur completely with the following comment made by Stauffacher56 in a thread in one of the Forums here: "I think the transcription is about the marker and should include everything it says. If I omit something (usually due to readability issues, sometimes because living persons are mentioned) I'll mention the nature of the omission in the note field. Things like names and dates could be presented differently on the marker vs. the fields on the top of the page. Photos aren't viewable by everyone, sometimes they're not very clear, and sometimes there isn't a photo at all. The transcription fills those gaps."

By making a complete transcription of the inscription, we do a big favor to folks without eyesight who depend on electronic readers to speak the words of a website to them. Those readers cannot read photographs.

Regarding living people, I find it impossible to "know" who is living or not. The fact that there might be a name on a grave marker either without any dates or with a birth date but no death date could mean that the person is deceased but the marker has not been updated (or it could reflect the fact that the person is not deceased). We cannot know the status of such a person without access to the immediate family. Of course, a faithful transcription needs to include that information since it is right there on the marker under the photos tab.

The tougher question is whether it is appropriate to create a memorial for a person whose death information is absent from the grave marker. Find A Grave rules prohibit the creation of a memorial if, but only if, the person is living. In the absence of knowing, however, I find it reasonable to create the memorial since the grave marker does mark the grave of the person. That is particularly true since I have found many instances where the death information is absent from the marker but I know that the person is deceased. Of course, I will delete a memorial promptly when contacted by a member of the family advising that the person is living and requesting deletion.

I do not adhere strictly to the FAQ suggestion (not a directive) that transfer requests should be for direct relatives within four generations (i.e., siblings, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren). I will transfer management of any memorial to any member of the extended family of the person in a memorial upon request with pleasure, provided that such person is equally liberal in granting transfer requests.

Personally, I'd rather have a memorial managed by a member of the extended family who has significant motivation to maximize the content of the memorial due to the family relationship than continue managing it myself. The distance back in time or the degree of relationship to that ancestor is irrelevant to the question of a person's commitment to the memorial.

Please provide your relationship to the person in the memorial when making the request.

This has been said about genealogy and I rather think that it applies with equal force to the volunteer work done here at Find A Grave:

Genealogy begins as an interest,
Becomes a hobby,
Continues as an avocation,
Takes over as an obsession,
And in its last stage,
Is an incurable disease.

If you would like me to take cemetery pictures for you, please include the grave location - one way to learn a grave location is to phone the cemetery; if a cemetery with thousands or even tens of thousands of graves has 20 photo requests and I have only an hour or two to take photographs, I am likely to select first the requests that include the grave location. Also, if you want multiple photographs (e.g., husband and wife), list both/all of them; I feel that I more helpful the more pictures that I take, so I am likely to give priority to a pair of requests.

If you would like to use one of my photos for your own personal purposes (e.g., to post on a profile on your family tree at Ancestry.com), feel free to do so, but please provide attribution (along the lines of "Originally contributed to the memorial for [name of person] on Find A Grave by Charlie Morgan").

A note about the Transcriptions Field - it's very time consuming to complete. I concur completely with the following comment made by Stauffacher56 in a thread in one of the Forums here: "I think the transcription is about the marker and should include everything it says. If I omit something (usually due to readability issues, sometimes because living persons are mentioned) I'll mention the nature of the omission in the note field. Things like names and dates could be presented differently on the marker vs. the fields on the top of the page. Photos aren't viewable by everyone, sometimes they're not very clear, and sometimes there isn't a photo at all. The transcription fills those gaps."

By making a complete transcription of the inscription, we do a big favor to folks without eyesight who depend on electronic readers to speak the words of a website to them. Those readers cannot read photographs.

Regarding living people, I find it impossible to "know" who is living or not. The fact that there might be a name on a grave marker either without any dates or with a birth date but no death date could mean that the person is deceased but the marker has not been updated (or it could reflect the fact that the person is not deceased). We cannot know the status of such a person without access to the immediate family. Of course, a faithful transcription needs to include that information since it is right there on the marker under the photos tab.

The tougher question is whether it is appropriate to create a memorial for a person whose death information is absent from the grave marker. Find A Grave rules prohibit the creation of a memorial if, but only if, the person is living. In the absence of knowing, however, I find it reasonable to create the memorial since the grave marker does mark the grave of the person. That is particularly true since I have found many instances where the death information is absent from the marker but I know that the person is deceased. Of course, I will delete a memorial promptly when contacted by a member of the family advising that the person is living and requesting deletion.